With its serried ranks of beach brollies and ribbons of restaurants and hotels lining the seafront, it hardly seems the most promising venue for a music festival.

The grey, flinty slopes covered in the serried ranks of vineyards, gave way to the high pastures, the Alpine meadows, which nourished the famed milch cattle of Switzerland.

As soon as motorists get used to counting two cameras before putting their foot down, it will be necessary to install three in a row, then four and so on until the whole county is covered by serried ranks of cameras.

The rigidity of a matrix is the number of entries in a matrix which need to be changed in order to bring the rank of the matrix down to a certain value.

This is the well-known criterion which says that a system of linear equations has a solution if and only if the rank of the matrix of the associated homogeneous system is equal to the rank of the augmented matrix of the system.

We use a generalized inverse of V, however, in case it is not of full rank; if this occurs, the degrees of freedom are the rank of the matrix V.

Origin

In relation to position in a hierarchy, rank has the same root as ring, and has been part of the language since medieval times, when it came into English from Old French. When we talk about the rank and file of an organization we mean the ordinary members as distinct from the leaders. This goes back to the idea of rows and columns of soldiers in military formation, drawn up ‘in rank and file’, the ranks being the rows and the files the columns. If you fail to maintain solidarity with your fellows you break ranks, and if you unite to defend a common interest you close ranks. In the armed forces the ranks are those who are not commissioned officers: if you work your way up from a lowly position to one of seniority you may be said to have risen from the ranks. Rank as an adjective is a different word, which dates back to Old English. Early senses included ‘fully grown’ and ‘luxuriant’, but later meanings involve the idea of disagreeable excess: a rank smell is extremely unpleasant, and rank grass grows too thickly.

pull rank

The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: The junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less, or ducking out before the bill arrives.

Origin

In relation to position in a hierarchy, rank has the same root as ring, and has been part of the language since medieval times, when it came into English from Old French. When we talk about the rank and file of an organization we mean the ordinary members as distinct from the leaders. This goes back to the idea of rows and columns of soldiers in military formation, drawn up ‘in rank and file’, the ranks being the rows and the files the columns. If you fail to maintain solidarity with your fellows you break ranks, and if you unite to defend a common interest you close ranks. In the armed forces the ranks are those who are not commissioned officers: if you work your way up from a lowly position to one of seniority you may be said to have risen from the ranks. Rank as an adjective is a different word, which dates back to Old English. Early senses included ‘fully grown’ and ‘luxuriant’, but later meanings involve the idea of disagreeable excess: a rank smell is extremely unpleasant, and rank grass grows too thickly.